Deng Xiaoping leads a far-reaching, audacious but risky Second Revolution

The leader of 1 billion Chinese was joking, of course; he lost part of the hearing in one ear long before he launched the world's most populous nation on an audacious effort to create what amounts almost to a new form of society. But, as might be expected from the diminutive (4 ft. 11 in.), steel-hard Deng, 81, it was a joke with a sharp point. If in his more solemn moments he still attempts to justify what he often calls his "second revolution" in the name of that patron saint of Communist revolution, Karl Marx, Deng is well aware that...